Old pc

[jayclark]

My sister got a old pc from a friend. She wants to just use it for Internet and to play pacman and a few other games. Well you can't really browse the internet. If you try to scroll down it would take 2-3 seconds for it to finish. But if i use Windows standard vga drivers the problem is half way solved. The vga drivers act like they do on any system. So I need to get drivers for a Cirrus Logic GD-5422 to get atleast 16 bit true color. I looked around for them and all i seen was 3.1 drivers. Anyone know where i can Win 95 drivers? I would of used the ones windows installed but they are the ones that caused the problem. Thanks..

[Platypus]

I don't know how encouraging to be about Win9x drivers for a card this old, do you know what slot type it is, ie ISA, VLB, PCI?

The problem you describe may actually just be due to the card being slow...

(Cards of this era were usually heavily hardware optimised for 256 colour operation - even if they have a 16bit or higher DAC, the performance is often pretty lazy. Dropping back to the standard VGA drivers will make it zippy as so much less data is being handled.)

[jayclark]

Its a isa slot card. I thought maybe the card was just slow. She was just going to use it until she saves enough to buy a new computer. The pc isn't much more that paper weight anyway. 200 mhz cpu, 32 megs of ram, 1 meg on video card. Makes me feel happy with my Pentium 3 pc.

[photolady]

Jay what brand is this computer?

[Platypus]

Originally posted by jayclark
Its a isa slot card.

It may be possible to improve things a little if we can find good drivers then, but probably not much with a 200MHz CPU and an ISA card (8MB/sec max transfer rate).

The highest standard resolutions you can have with 1M on the card are 800x600 16bit (hi-color) or 640x480 24bit (tru-color) if it has a 24/32 bit DAC (unlikely on an ISA card).

[jayclark]

Well, the drivers the Windows installed, supports up to 24 bit but only 640x480. Right now I have it running at 800x600 at 16 bit true color.

Photolady, not for sure who made the pc, but it says WIN 486 on the front. I cracked it open some last night. I could oc the cpu to 233 but the place where you put the cmos battery is broken. So bios won't save it. And can't find a jumper since I have no clue which jumper is what. I beleive the clip that holds the battery is gone. I know it has an intel chipset in it.

[jayclark]

Well she is sort of happy with it, I wish there was a way to get the bios to save. I could get a lil more boost out of it from tweaking them. I was going to install a version of Linux that I know works good on old pc and would be great for her but can't save the bios to be able to boot the cd... She has the internet working so so, and can play dos games so she is happy. still want to get the annoying slow screen refreshing fixed. I might go pick up a 8 meg pci video card. Thoses are cheap, see if that fixes it.